


Creative Solutions

by CommunionNimrod



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), Pre-Relationship, Tendo shouldn't make jokes, he just puts ideas in Hermann's mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 10:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14543061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommunionNimrod/pseuds/CommunionNimrod
Summary: With no kaiju activity in ten months, everyone in the PPDC has been a little ... on edge.  No one more so than the resident K-Science division.  With Hermann and Newt at each other's throats more than normal, someone has to get a little creative.





	Creative Solutions

**Author's Note:**

> This whole premise came from a hilarious conversation with my wonderful friend gooberfeesh. The thought? What if Hermann just had a water bottle to spray Newt with when he was being annoying? Thus, this ridiculousness was born.

It was taking all of Hermann’s willpower to keep himself from letting his head smack down onto the table he was sitting at.  He was exhausted, tense, and irritated, and no matter what he tried to do he could STILL hear the sound of his lab partner being obnoxious on the other side of the mess hall.  He and Newton had been at each other’s throats all week.  It was normal for them to fight, but the past few days had been especially bad. **  
**

The same could be said for the entire Shatterdome, however.  It had been almost ten months since the last kaiju attack, and while Hermann felt awful for even thinking it, he knew the emergence of another beast would be a relief to everyone in the PPDC.  Destruction and death was not what they wanted, but at least then they had immediate **goals** , things to do, new information to dissect.  As it stood currently, everyone was just … playing the waiting game.

Across the room Newton was loudly greeting one of the J-tech interns, and Hermann twitched.  There was a soft laughter in front of him, and as he looked up, Tendo was sitting down across from him, coffee mug in hand and grin on his face.

“Someone’s clearly irritated with our leather-clad Doctor Newt, huh?” he asked, leaning an elbow on the edge of the table.  Hermann sighed, pushing his mostly untouched tray to the side and nodding.

“He is being a lot more irritating than normal,” he grumbled, giving a sideways glance towards the man in question.  His shoulders slumped and he sighed, looking back over at Tendo.  “He is getting into everything, and being especially unprofessional.  It’s hard enough not having something to work on and truly focus on, but what little focus I am attempting is demolished on a daily basis by whatever ridiculous thing he plagues our lab with next.”

“Sounds like you’ve got some major pent-up frustration,” Tendo pointed out, eyebrow raised.  Hermann rolled his eyes and scoffed as the bowtie-clad man’s grin turned into a suggestive smirk.

“I’ll not have you going down that road again,” he snapped, pointing a finger at him and glaring.  Tendo raised a hand, palm out, a gesture to tell him to ease up a bit.

It was bad enough that Hermann had some inexplicable crush on Newton, something he still chalked up to insanity and having to be around the man day in and day out.  They had been working together for almost seven years now, and he felt as though he almost hated the man as much as he respected him.  It got worse with his infuriating lapse in judgement to confess to Tendo one quiet, vulnerable evening that maybe he’d had a couple dreams where the two of them were intimate, and _maybe_ he started noticing all the little ways he found Newton attractive, and that **_maybe_** he just wanted to let his guard down and lean against his smaller frame, have those tattooed arms wrap around his waist …

Hermann shook his head, huffing and glaring at Tendo again for good measure.  It was ridiculous, and it was never going to happen.  He had accepted that.  So why did Tendo have to keep bringing it up?

“Okay brother, okay, my bad,” Tendo said softly, lowering his hand again.  “Well, you know what you could always do?”

“What, pray tell, is that?” Hermann asked tiredly.

“Get a water bottle and spray him when he’s being particularly irritating.”

Hermann stared and blinked.   _What_?  Either the suggestion itself, or the look on his face when it was voiced, caused Tendo to burst out into a fit of laughter.  Hermann continued to stare, a bit baffled, and waiting patiently for the man across from him to collect himself.

“You cannot be serious,” Hermann said flatly once the laughter had quieted some.

“No,” Tendo snorted.  “No, I’m not.  But man.  That’d be funny as hell to see, I’ll admit that.  I don’t know what I love thinking about more, the idea of you actually spraying him with a water bottle, or his reaction to it.”

Hermann shook his head, rolling his eyes again and reaching for his cane.  He’d had quite enough time in the mess hall, his senses becoming overloaded from being around so many people.  Even if he was generally left alone, the sheer noise and numbers moving about always got to him over time.

“On that bizarre note,” he said as he stood, picking up his tray to deposit on his way out.  “I am going to attempt to get some kind of work done.  Good day, Tendo.”

“See ya, my man,” Tendo waved, standing as well and wandering off.  

Hermann nodded, and turned to leave the mess hall, very pointedly not looking in Newton’s direction as he did.

 

* * *

Back in the lab, Hermann went over to his chalkboards and gazed at everything he had written there.  He was stuck.  It happened from time to time, but it was aggravating nonetheless.  He had been working on his predictive model, one that had proven to become more and more accurate with each attack (though not as accurate yet as Hermann would have preferred).  However, his model had not predicted such a dead zone.  There was no reason for it, no indication that there would have been such a lull.  

Sighing, he turned away from his boards and gazed around their currently silent lab, both hands resting on his cane.  It made no sense.  That was truthfully why everyone was so restless.  Why had the kaiju stopped emerging, what were they _planning_?  They had to be planning something, there was no other explanation.

He brought a hand up to tap the pads of his fingers against his lips.  As he examined his surroundings (of which he was already all too familiar with, he could navigate this lab with his eyes closed), something caught his attention at the far end of Newton’s side.  Hermann’s brow furrowed.  Amongst the assortment of beakers and test tubes, stuck behind a microscope, was … mein gott.  It was a water bottle.  Hermann thought back to Tendo’s joking suggestion in the mess hall earlier, and he scoffed, but then he paused.

It actually … wasn’t the worst idea.

Hermann was well aware Tendo had been making a joke, that he wasn’t **actually** suggesting what he had said, but his friend’s words gave him pause as he started at the empty bottle.  Huh.  Smirking a bit, he strode across the room, retrieving the bottle, and taking it over to one of the sinks to fill it up.

Let it be said that Hermann Gottlieb would never refrain from trying anything that intrigued him at least once.  Besides, if it was an effective method against his infuriating colleague, he absolutely could not pass the chance up.

 

* * *

“Listen, I’m just -  I’m just saying, dude, maybe if I pull some of the old samples out of storage, I can, ah, I dunno,” Newton was rambling, tugging at his messy hair and pacing the lab.  Hermann sighed, pausing in the equations he was writing and closing his eyes against the headache threatening to form.

“Newton, you have already done that,” he muttered, clearing his throat and erasing some numbers with his sleeve.  As he started writing again, a loud piercing yell caused him to drag the chalk downward in a violent slant.

“I’m going crazy here!” Newton was yelling, wandering over to Hermann’s side of the lab.  “Gimme something to do.”

“Stay away from my things,” Hermann growled, biting his lip as he erased the involuntary mark.

“Well if I can’t do any of **my** work, I can at least improve yours.”

“My work does not need improving, certainly not from you, get away.”

“Nope, not gonna happen.”

Hermann curled his hand in a fist as Newton hopped up on HIS desk, his butt knocking over a stack of folders he’d just sorted earlier that day.  Hermann wanted to scream.  He dropped his chalk and spun, glaring.

“Get down from there, you are messing up my entire-”

“OH NO I AM MESSING UP YOUR WORKSPACE, SO VERY SORRY, MY GOODNESS,” Newton mocked loudly, picking up a calculator just to toss it a bit further away from him.

“Newton,” Hermann said in a threatening tone.

“ _Hermannnnnnn_ ,” the man mocked right back.

Alright.  Fine.  This was happening.  Hermann thought back to the day before, and decided to take action.  He walked over to where his computer was, leaning over, and snatched up the water bottle he had set down underneath the desk and had forgotten about for the rest of the day.  He then closed the distance just enough to raise it, take aim, and squirt water **directly** into Newton’s face.

The man yelped, jumping back so quickly he almost fell off the desk.  Water droplets covered his glasses, and Newton was sputtering, looking around frantically, before his bewildered eyes settled on Hermann and his weapon of choice.

There was stunned silence for .3 seconds.

“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING HELL, HERMANN?!” Newt shrieked, jumping off the desk and rubbing his face on the shoulder of his sleeve.  “Did you just-  DID YOU JUST SQUIRT ME WITH WATER LIKE I’M SOME SORT OF ANIMAL???”

“Well if you insist on behaving like one, what else do you expect me to do,” Hermann snapped, slamming the bottle down on the desk.

“You.  You little bitch.  I swear to fucking god, do you wanna throw down right here?  Cause I’m ready baby, I’ll kick the shit out of you.”

“This is not a school yard, Newton, honestly.”

“Well YA COULDA FOOLED ME, MAN.”

“It’s not that big of a-”

“Yes it IS that big of a deal, Hermann, I’m not a goddamned cat that’s knocking shit off your desk.”

Hermann looked pointedly at the stack of folders now scattered haphazardly on the table.  The same table that Newton had just been SITTING on.  His lab partner followed his gaze, quiet for a moment.

“S-shut up,” Newton snapped.  “GOD I can’t believe you did that.  I’m.  Wow, you’re such a bitch.”

“Classy,” Hermann said sarcastically, rolling his eyes.  Newton stuck up his middle finger.  “Mmm yes, even more so.”

“ _Fuck.  You._ ”

Hermann watched as Newton rubbed his face again and turned, storming off and out of the lab (though he made sure to stick a hand out and knock a container of pencils onto the floor before he exited Hermann’s side of the lab).  Hermann just growled again.  He was such a child.

Not a goddamned cat, indeed.  Shaking his head, Hermann took a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself down again, before he began resorting all of the files that had been knocked around in Newton’s whirlwide of chaos.

 

* * *

Newt had needed a drink BADLY.  Or two.  Or five.  After a pit stop to his room to change shirts, since SOMEONE he knew whose name started with H and was a bitch decided to get his face and chest wet, he stormed off to find Tendo and drag him to their usual bar nearby the Shatterdome.

He was starting drink number three when he finally broke down and started ranting.

“I just.  Tendo, dude, he’s driving me crazy,” Newt was complaining, cheeks red from alcohol consumption and the warmth inside the bar.  He smacked an elbow down on the table, wincing at the force behind it irritating his funny bone.

“We’re all a little on edge, brother,” Tendo said gently, shrugging and taking a sip of his beer.  He was only on drink two.

“Yeah, but.  That’s not what this is.  I seriously almost thought we were about to get in a legit physical fight today,” Newt sighed, running a hand through his hair and tugging at it a bit.  “I mean.  LISTEN.  Do you know what he fucking did today?!”

“What did Doctor Gottlieb do today?” Tendo asked.  Newt almost glared at the tone in his voice.

“He fucking-  Tendo, _Tendo_ , he fucking sprayed me in the face with a water bottle.”

Newt had to jump and lean back to avoid the beer that Tendo instantly spat out across the table.  His eyes went wide, what the hell?!  He’d never seen his friend spit take before.  Immediately, Tendo was doubling over, laughing so hard the people sitting at the table behind them turned and stared.

“D-dude,” Newt stammered, looking around and shrugging at the strangers, just as clueless as they were.

“I can’t believe he ACTUALLY did that!” Tendo managed to get out through his laughter.

“What?”  He couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or being taken completely off guard, but Newt was just drawing a blank.  Error, Newt.exe has stopped working.

“I-” Tendo started, trying to get himself under control.  He sat up again, wheezing, wiping tears out of his eyes.  “I may have joked at him in the mess yesterday while he was taking a turn on the complain train.  I may have told him to spray you with water when you were being particularly irritating.”

Tendo was still chuckling, trying to get himself under control, and Newt just sat there.  Frozen.  His eyes were wide and his mouth was hanging open.

“You total shit!” he screeched, his voice piercing through the loud bar. “That was YOUR fault?!”

“Hey, Newt my man, listen, he knew I was kidding, he even ASKED,” Tendo defended.  Newt wasn’t having it.

“You told a joke to the King of Literal, **Tendo** , you couldn’t have seriously believed it was just a joke,” Newt continued to yell, flailing about a bit.  “Oh man, you are gonna get it, I am gonna get you back SO GOOD, do you know how insanely humiliating I felt?!”

“Ah, I bet it was hilarious,” Tendo groaned, covering his face.  “And I missed it, maaaaan.”

“Okay, come here,” Newt challenged, shooting out of his chair and grabbing Tendo, hooking an arm around his neck and pulling him into a fighting embrace right there in the middle of the bar.  They tugged and pushed at each other for maybe a minute before someone was breaking them apart and kicking them out.

The cool evening air slapped them both in the face, and Newt groaned.

“Good job, you got us kicked out,” he sighed, shoving his hands in his leather jacket as they started walking.

“Um, YOU got us kicked out, brother.”

“Yeah yeah… I can’t believe you told Hermann to squirt me with a water bottle.”  All the fight had left Newt’s voice, but he was still completely in shock at how the entire day had gone.

“Yeah, well,” Tendo shrugged. “It was funny, wasn’t it?”

“No.”

“Yeeeeaah, it was funny, wasn’t it?”

“....maybe a little.”


End file.
